Re_ | In material, immaterial: Jane Lee, Pinaree Sanpitak, Shirazeh Houshiary 18.06.2021 — 30.06.2021

About The Exhibition

Re_ by STPI is a series of multi-platform viewing rooms. It brings together a selection of works from STPI’s inventory, placing them in new constellations for us to relook at them in fresh contexts. These will take place on our website and Artsy, as well as in-person. With a different focus for each iteration, the presentations will be refreshed regularly throughout the year. In the spirit of re-presenting these artworks in new situations, our first 3 viewing rooms will take place at the dynamic ArtSpace @ HeluTrans from 18 June to 26 July 2021.

We invite you to come down, or visit us online, to Re_Visit, Re_View and Re_Connect with us through our inaugural Re_ viewing room, In material, immaterial.

In material, immaterial: Jane Lee, Pinaree Sanpitak, Shirazeh Houshiary

Being in the world, being of the world.

Throughout human history, artists have always been drawn to nature for inspiration. But where nature and culture are put in opposition, we forget that we are part of the landscape, too.

The artists—Jane Lee, Pinaree Sanpitak, Shirazeh Houshiary—all look to their surroundings, as well as inwards, for inspiration. In their conceptual gestures, no binaries are drawn, no distance is carved between the human and everything else.

At STPI, Jane Lee invites figurative forms into her art-making for the first time. The bird becomes a recurring imagery, emblematic of freedom in flight—or the lack of it. Through inviting us into the fantastic yet familiar world of birds and nature, we are nudged towards thinking “what does it mean to be free?” through our entanglements, rather than detachments, with these subjects. 

Pinaree Sanpitak continues on her exploration of the breast-stupa motif here, which emanates suggestions of the bodily flesh, (local) cultural conditions, earthliness and cosmology, all together at once. With the breast-stupa configured in a number of ways, the artist enables a fluidity in interpretation and prompts us to be in deeper engagement with the world we inhabit.

Shirazeh Houshiary produced two bodies of work at STPI. One series, Migrant, compares the geographical flow of humans to the rain trees of Singapore, who are themselves migrants from Mexico and Peru. In coalescing the two, the artist elicits the fluid, organic nature of human flows through cultures and civilisations, with no centre and boundaries. 

Through the artworks in In material, immaterial, we invite you to reconnect with the phenomenological approach of encountering the world, and ourselves in it.